Liquors and Learns
This is Eric. He’s a mega creative and people swarm to him for it. He asked me to take his picture like i knew what i was doing, but he was the one that taught me a few tricks instead. He told me to look for the half moments and i’ve learned to love those. The seconds in between when they forget that you’re there with your camera. When they’re shy or shameful and suddenly feeling exposed; the laughter between the clicks. It was the best advice i’ve gotten as a photographer to be honest.
I’ve never felt confident about my process and I usually don’t feel good about a picture until I see it finished. By then I know that was the picture I was hoping to take all along - I just didn’t know that when I took it. I told someone today that I feel like my pictures stand out because they always feel slightly off but he told me that he thought I was “over the hump” of making real photos. The hump being the proverbial jump from amateur to professional, I guess.
Eric said, “people will hire you for your end-product, not for how you work” which hadn’t really sunk in until just now. As someone who lives in the moment, I “wing” a lot of what I do and just hope that I didn’t miss the opportunity I would’ve wanted. So it’ll be a joke if I ever get hired for my professionalism. I think I should start a series called work in progress and it will be short collections of everything I take in volumes.
These are my work in progress with Eric:
